A mudlarking year, p.25
A Mudlarking Year, page 25
Fossiling at Lyme is best after a good high tide or a storm that washes over the lumps of rock and mud that are continually falling out of the cliffs. Today’s tide isn’t particularly good, but I was still hopeful. ‘You have to be careful with the tide,’ says Mike. ‘Even when it’s low it can suddenly surge up and catch you out.’ The rain gradually eases off and the sun tries to break through, spreading an eerie yellow light across the sea and up the beach. I look up at the cliffs where mud is rolling and crumbling off the sheer sides. ‘Don’t go near the cliffs, either,’ says Mike. ‘They’re always moving, especially after rain like this, and they can slide at any point. A few years ago a woman was killed a little way along from where we were standing, and it took them hours to dig her out.’
Mike reads the cliffs in the same way I read the foreshore, but for him it is like looking at a layer cake with millions of years in each slice. He knows, when certain layers collapse onto the beach, what they are likely to contain, and he is continually scanning the cliffs for fossils that are about to fall out. My first find isn’t a fossil, though.
As Mike is explaining how the ichthyosaur bones work their way out of the cliff and fall onto the beach, I spot a small cross-shaped thing next to his foot. It looks like a World War II German Iron Cross, but with no engraving, it has to be something else. It is a medal, I am sure of that, but it takes me some time later to work out which one. The central medallion, which would have had the dates 1915–18, has fallen out and it is badly pitted and eaten away by time, salt water and acid soil, but the shape and the two crossed swords confirms it to be a World War I Croix de Guerre.
This medal was created to honour acts of bravery and was conferred on any member of the armed forces, French citizens and foreigners who had been mentioned in dispatches. It was awarded to entire towns and once even given to a pigeon called Cher Ami who helped to save the lives of 194 American soldiers by carrying a message across enemy lines in the heat of battle. I wonder who had received this medal and why. It must have been thrown away, either on purpose or by accident, and ended up in the town dump.
The dump on top of the cliff had been officially used from 1908 to 1974, although it had started to fizzle out of use in the 1950s. Then, one evening in late May 2008, there was a huge landslide. According to Mike, the following morning was perfectly calm and sunny, the tide was in and a small watercourse was running from the cliff, through the freshly exposed dump material. It carried with it broken glass and bottles that tinkled as they made their way down to the sea, where scores of old bottles were bobbing about on the surface. ‘It was surreal,’ says Mike. Initially the landslide was dry and dusty with a ‘strange earthy smell’ that became more chemically pungent when it rained.
I poke around in the rusted iron, pottery, glass and old batteries and find a number ‘6’ from a military badge; a World War I Machine Gun Corps button; the rusted remains of a pocket watch (the little cogs were scattered nearby); a handful of pitted and crusty pre-decimal coins; a green bead; and a marble. I’d been told a lot of military badges and buttons turn up here, mostly from World War I, but nobody really knows why.
In among the rust and glass I find my first ammonite. It is a perfect, dull-gold spiral no larger than my little fingernail. ‘Ammonite’ comes from the name of the ancient Egyptian god Amun, who was depicted with a fine set of ram’s horns and this is what it looks like: a tiny, tightly curled ram’s horn, balanced on my cold, wet finger. ‘They’re beautiful,’ says Mike when I show him, ‘but they’re not easy to keep.’ I already know its time in this world will be fleeting from bitter experience. The pyritised twigs and tiny shells I had collected from the London clay at Warden Bay on the outer Thames Estuary disintegrated into a pile of dust within four years and I had to hoover them out of my finds chest. They had taken millions of years to form and just a couple to crumble away to nothing.
We chat as we search. I find some more pyrite ammonites, then, only half an hour after stepping onto the beach, among the last century’s old stair-rod fixings, broken Shippam’s paste pots and dissolving batteries, I find an ichthyosaur vertebra. It is a chunky piece of grey stone, seven-sided and concave. ‘That was a lucky find,’ says Mike, ‘there’s been at least four professionals over here this morning already.’ I’d seen him say a brief hello to someone earlier, and in the distance I could see a couple of intense searchers in wellies, but I hadn’t noticed that many other people. ‘Is there much competition here?’ I ask, somehow expecting the world of fossil-hunting to be less competitive and political than mudlarking. ‘Yes, we tend to work alone,’ says Mike. ‘It’s highly competitive and a race to be first on the beach. Most of us get on, but we’re quite independent. There are a few people you learn to avoid, but I suppose that’s just life.’ According to Mike, there are about twenty regular professional collectors, but many more appear after a big landslide when the pickings are good. There is also an army of serious amateur collectors who are very dedicated and make some spectacular finds.
Since it gained World Heritage status, you need permission to dig into the cliffs and beach bedrock. There is an official code of conduct to protect the coastline and its fossils that encourages the reporting of important specimens and promotes the collection of fossils in a safe and sustainable way. In Mike’s opinion it works well, and it’s self-policing. ‘People do report those who dig and at the moment it’s fairly easy to apply for permission if you see something special, so it works.’
We search separately for a while, then Mike comes running back to me holding a brown lump. ‘This is what you’re looking for,’ he says proudly. ‘Poo!’ I shout above the now pelting rain. ‘But how do you know?’ ‘It’s a different density to other rocks,’ he explains, ‘so it washes up in certain places, a bit like your things on the Thames, I suppose. If you look at the shape, you can tell it’s poo, and those little black bits are the scales and bones of the fish it ate.’ I am delighted.
‘Shall we split some rocks now?’ says Mike. He vanishes off and reappears with two large smooth grey nodules. To me they look like all the other rocks, but Mike’s got the eye, and he knows where the treasure is hidden. He cleans off the mud, then rolls the stone expertly in his hands. ‘Sometimes you see the keel of the ammonite sticking out around the edge,’ he says, ‘otherwise I need a good place to put the chisel where I won’t damage any fossils near the surface. We should end up with the internal cast on one side and the shell on the other,’ he says, holding the rock between his feet. Three perfectly positioned strikes of his hammer and it splits cleanly in two. There is a pause and I find myself holding my breath. Slowly, almost theatrically, he opens the nodule like a book to reveal three small spiral rock snails, opaque crystal cream against the dull grey rock.
Mike sighs. ‘It’s the first time they’ve seen the light in millions of years. Such beauty this rock’s been hiding, and what a journey.’ The last time these creatures saw daylight they were swimming in a shallow tropical sea, close to where the top of Africa is now. When they died, they drifted down into thick sediment and fell between branches and twigs that were already lying on the sea floor. As the plates moved and the Earth shifted, geology brought them to Lyme.
Wed 30 November (low tide 0.96 m @ London Bridge, 12.37)
Central London – North and South Bank
I leave home at 5.50 a.m. to a meagre dawn chorus. Now the evenings are so dark, most of my trips to the river will need to start early. The morning mist eventually burns away and the sky turns cold, clear and blue. I search for a while on my hands and knees next to a large crow, who is turning over stones and roof tiles looking for food. As I search, I mull over the padlock I’d found on my last visit. I have decided to leave it alone and not to risk destroying it by trying to knock off the rust. I think about it again and mentally confirm the decision is right. Eventually the crow stalks off to another patch and I look up to see a man in Lycra trying to push a racing bike over the shingle. He is trying to look as nonchalant as he can, as if he had always intended to bring his expensive bike down to the foreshore, but it is obvious he has taken a wrong turn.
Burnt, spent rockets from Bonfire Night are still washing up and so has a pumpkin whose carved face is disintegrating and folding in on itself. I kick it absent-mindedly and it smushes into pieces; I wonder if the crow will come back and eat it. Beside it are two bone ends for the bone tree and a yellow-plastic toy plane is emerging wing first from the mud. It has ‘MADE IN HONG KONG’ on its undercarriage and it looks like an old cereal-box toy; later research confirms it’s been hanging around since the 1960s.
Then I spot a mudlark I recognise walking decisively towards me. ‘Have you heard the news?’ he says when he reaches me. I have, there aren’t many people on the foreshore who haven’t, and it’s caused quite a stir. About a week ago the PLA announced that, although they were still renewing old permits, they were pausing the issue of new ones to ‘protect the historical integrity of the Thames foreshore’. In 2018 there were around 200 people with mudlarking permits and now there are over 5,000, with numbers leaping during lockdown when people were looking for outside space and something to do. How many permits are ‘live’ and how many have only been used once or twice is anyone’s guess, but the concern is that the PLA might go even further and ban mudlarking altogether.
‘People are worried,’ the mudlark says. ‘I’m going over to the north side to see what they’re saying, do you want to come?’ But I don’t want to get caught up in a group panic, so I politely decline and we part ways at the river stairs in front of the Globe theatre. I push it to the back of my mind to think about later and carry on as I’d planned. At the bottom of the river wall I pick up three semi-precious stone bracelets that look as if they were thrown in last night, perhaps as an offering to the river, then I race another mudlark across a bank of sharp rubble to my hunting ground east of Southwark Bridge, and I am glad I did. I had given up searching this area earlier in the year when a blanket of sand appeared almost overnight and smothered it, but it is being uncovered again and there is a new line of small metal and lead that’s worth picking through.
I work my way along the waterline, then up onto the rubble to the bare patches of mud where objects sometimes catch. As I wobble across the bricks and flint, I see a rectangular thing, just smaller than the size of a matchbox, and recognise it straight away as a decorated pewter buckle plate. Colin later confirms it is fourteenth or fifteenth century and probably a cheaper version of the more upmarket copper alloy or silver buckle plates that were produced at the time.
The end of a leather belt would have slipped into the plate and been secured by a pin, now missing. The buckle frame, which is also missing, would have done the belt up. The decoration is Gothic in style and similar to designs found on furniture and church screens of the time. Colin promises to send me one of his shiny replicas, which is almost exactly the same but slightly smaller, for a three-quarter-inch belt instead of a one-inch belt like mine.
There is enough time left on the tide to cross Southwark Bridge for a quick look on the north side, which is quieter now some people have left, and I drop down a short ladder onto the foreshore at Queenhithe, where it is sunnier and warmer. The stinking stream of effluent that has been flowing from the Walbrook has finally dried up and a moorhen struggles past against the tide. A seagull swoops down and grabs a pink plastic dummy out of the strandline of plastic and looks at me comically. I wave my arms to try and make it drop it, but it flies off like a giant white-winged baby.
Winter
December
Thursday 1 December
The Society of Antiquaries
According to the meteorological calendar, winter begins today. It is the end of the year, winter is back, time has passed, and another twelve months have ticked by. The moment we are born a clock starts ticking that only stops when we die. Our time here is made up of the present, the past and the future. The present is fleeting – catching it is like trapping a flea. Even as I write this, my present is becoming my past. I am writing my way into the future, briefly engaging with the present and creating the past. Past time is concrete, factual and real. The future is uncertain, unwritten and not yet real; it hasn’t happened yet, so can it even really be called time or is time in general just an illusion? Mother Nature doesn’t set her watch, birds don’t roost according to the hands on a clock and flowers don’t open on the hour; only humans choose to chain themselves to something as spurious and contrived as time.
Sarah says I have no concept of time, but I do. I think about it a lot. Maybe not immediate time, but I know where I stand in the wider concept of time, important time, the time before and after my fleeting visit to this world. I know how little of this great passage of time we occupy. I just lose track of unimportant everyday time sometimes, and I suppose I try to trap time through the things I keep in my Wunderkammer. Perhaps my search has become too obsessive and my research too feverish, but the tiny slivers of the past I find in the mud help me to understand my place. That I may just be a fragment, but I still fill a useful space in time.
Most people are searching for something; perhaps mudlarks are searching harder than others. I don’t know if I will ever find what I am looking for because I don’t think I really know what I’ve lost or what I’m searching for, or maybe I just don’t want to find it. All I do know is that I can’t stop looking.
I spend the day at the Society of Antiquaries, lost in their library and museum. So lost, in fact, that I lose track of time. I am half an hour late for the meeting where I am supposed to be formally admitted, and by the time I slide in at the back, the lecture has already started, and I have missed my official admittance as a Fellow of the society.
I sit at the back of the room on a hard wooden bench, half-listening to the career of the herald and antiquary Peter Le Neve (1661–1729). There is a wall of tweed between me and the speaker, and the room smells of wood, leather and dust. A large clock above the door ticks away the hour, rows of pan-faced Tudors gaze down at me from paintings on the walls and I can see the famous old black bicorn or cocked hat that is always placed in front of the president during meetings.
After the lecture, I sidle up to the society’s president and apologise. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says with a gentle smile. ‘Come next time. Sherry? Dry, medium or sweet?’ I take the last glass of dry and promise not to be late next time.
Friday 2 December (low tide 1.36 m @ North Woolwich, 14.47)
A Secret Location
Locations are a prickly topic within the mudlarking community. Some people are happy to divulge where they search, others are not. I’ve been criticised for being too open about locations, but it’s not rocket science. There will be more stuff where the river was busiest in the past. Of course, I don’t give away my best find spots within those locations, and they can change overnight at the whim of the river anyway, but telling someone to go to Rotherhithe to mudlark, for example, won’t help them any more than telling them to go to London to buy a pair of jeans. The Rotherhithe foreshore is long and complex, and the only way to find anything is through time, patience and persistence.
There’s only one location I keep completely secret and that’s where there is a mini-hoard of sixteenth-century gold that has been gradually washing out of the mud. None of the pieces is longer than around 0.7 in and most are broken, incomplete or crushed, but enough is left of them to see that they were exquisitely crafted and would have originally belonged to someone of high social standing. Mudlarks have been finding single pieces spread across a fairly small area since around 2014. The Museum of London has recorded hundreds of them, including single links and tiny shavings, as well as the delicately decorated lace aglet I found several years ago. Most likely the gold was in a pocket or pouch – perhaps it was scrap gold for melting down – which means that there might be a rich epicentre waiting to surface one day.
There is already someone at the mini-hoard site today. She is checking all the usual places, and I can tell she knows exactly what she is doing. It is the golden elephant on the foreshore. Neither of us wants to mention it, so we do a little verbal dance: ‘Found anything?’ ‘Not much, are you looking for anything special?’ ‘Just pebbles. I don’t really know what I’m looking for.’ Though she does, because I’ve seen her here many times before. I want to ask if she’s found any gold, but I can’t because that would be telling her that it’s here, even though she probably already knows. And she’s not the only one. I once met a man who gave me an exaggerated wink and said cryptically, ‘I know what you’re here for.’
Mudlarks do this all along the foreshore. A subtle exchange to suss out who’s in the know and who isn’t, what’s been found and what hasn’t. Some mudlarks lie: one man is always complaining that he’s never found anything, but for someone who doesn’t find much, he spends a lot of time looking. I’ve fibbed to people too. I’ve told them I found something in a completely different place from where I really found it and watched them scuttle off to see if I’ve missed anything else. It’s a game, and I’m sure people have done the same thing to me.
At the hoard site, I pounce on every tiny white stone that shines in the weak winter sun and fragments of little curled snail shells that deceive me. I pick out an oyster shell that looks like the edge of a silver coin, and every humble, shiny pin looks like treasure. I search with my nose close to the ground, and I look in every nook and cranny, but there is no glint of gold today.
Sunday 11 December (low tide 1.13 m @ London Bridge, 09.57)
Central London – South Bank
London is covered in a thick swirling cloud of fog that seems to pour from the river itself. It formed when the land cooled quickly under last night’s cold, clear sky and moisture in the air condensed. The tiny droplets of water are not large enough to land like rain, so they float en masse like a cloud. Even if they were to fall, there wouldn’t be enough water to call it rain. If an Olympic swimming pool was filled with fog, it would yield just 1.25 litres of actual water.
